¹⁶ “When you help the Hebrew women give birth, observe them as they deliver. If the child is a son, kill him, but if it’s a daughter, she may live.” ¹⁷ The midwives, however, feared God^(A) and did not do as the king of Egypt had told them;^(B) they let the boys live.

²² Pharaoh then commanded all his people, “You must throw every son born to the Hebrews into the Nile, but let every daughter live.”^(A)

Moses’s Birth and Adoption

2 Now a man from the family of Levi married a Levite woman.^{(A) 2} The woman became pregnant and gave birth to a son; when she saw that he was beautiful,^[a] she hid him for three months.^{(B) 3} But when she could no longer hide him, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with asphalt and pitch. She placed the child in it and set it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile. ⁴ Then his sister^(C) stood at a distance in order to see what would happen to him.

⁵ Pharaoh’s daughter went down to bathe at the Nile while her servant girls walked along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds, sent her slave girl, took it, ⁶ opened it, and saw him, the child—and there he was, a little boy, crying. She felt sorry for him and said, “This is one of the Hebrew boys.”

⁷ Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Should I go and call a Hebrew woman who is nursing to nurse the boy for you?”

⁸ “Go,” Pharaoh’s daughter told her. So the girl went and called the boy’s mother. ⁹ Then Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse him for me, and I will pay your wages.” So the woman took the boy and nursed him.